Diana McLellan, Gossip Columnist With an Ear to Washington, Dies at 76

Diana McLellan, a grande dame of Washington gossip who perforated the pretentious, skewered the powerful and sometimes felt honor-bound to keep fact-checkers from coming between her bons mots and her “darlings,” as she called the devoted readers of her syndicated newspaper column, died on Thursday in Easton, Md. She was 76.

The cause was cancer, a family spokesman said.

Mrs. McLellan, who was born in Britain, established her reputation as the capital’s most delicious read during a relatively brief, cometlike span of 10 years.

She created her arch, mischievous persona as chief writer of the column The Ear in The Washington Star in 1975, then moved to The Washington Post when The Star folded in 1981. After a year at The Post, she wrote a column called Diana Hears for The Washington Times until 1985 and then became an editor at Washingtonian magazine.

In her gossip heyday at The Star, Mrs. McLellan was the must-read who chronicled the mating habits of cabinet secretaries, members of Congress and other “Terrifics,” as she referred to the constantly changing gallery of power players in town; explained the courtship vicissitudes of prominent couples like the Washington Post reporter Sally Quinn and her boss, Ben Bradlee (“the Fun Couple,” as she called them, until Mr. Bradlee became her boss); and generally treated the most status-conscious grandees in the world like another funny-hat crowd in town for a Moose meeting or a frozen-food convention.

“Spelling people’s names wrong sometimes helps keep them humble,” she once wrote, explaining her proclivity for misspellings and more serious mistakes. She added, with a dash of sheepishness, “Does not work in Zbigniew Brzezinski.”

“She was mesmerizing,” said Chuck Conconi, who succeeded her as The Post’s gossip columnist. “This is a city that’s afraid of itself. They had never seen anything like it and haven’t since.”

When The Ear made a mistake, Mrs. McLellan wrote a correction — more like a mea culpa, or, as she called it, a “grovel.” Jim Bellows, the Star editor during her tenure, quoted her in his 2002 memoirs, “The Last Editor,” as explaining that she used even her grovels for entertainment.

Sometimes her victim was beyond further punishment. Spying the name “D. Acheson” on a party guest list during Jimmy Carter’s presidency, she placed the former secretary of state Dean Acheson among the Terrifics spotted there.

“Ear writhed with anguish to learn that Dean Acheson, whom it had listed among Terrifics whooping it up at a divine party recently, is a teensy bit dead, and has been for ages,” she wrote after being informed that he had died in 1971.

She made her most serious mistake soon after she moved to The Post in 1981, when she reported — incorrectly — that President Carter had bugged Blair House, the presidential guest quarters, to eavesdrop on Ronald and Nancy Reagan in the days before Mr. Carter left office and Mr. Reagan was sworn in. Mr. Carter threatened to sue, The Post ran a correction, and Mrs. McLellan soon left for The Washington Times.

“They had lawyers at her elbow, looking at every word she wrote,” Mr. Conconi said.

Mrs. McLellan maintained a philosophical distance from her mistakes. Journalistic errors paled in comparison with what she considered the greatest of human failings: being boring.

“It’s as though the Jacuzzi of Washington has been turned off and everyone is sitting around wet, waiting for towels," she said, describing the transition from the Reagan presidency to that of George Bush. “It’s so very quiet.”

Diana Blanche Dicken was born on Sept. 22, 1937, in Leicester, England. She came to Washington in 1957 with her father, a British military attaché, and stayed on. She is survived by her husband, Richard X. McLellan Jr.; a daughter from a previous marriage, Fiona Weeks; a sister; three grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Asked once what kind of news or rumor she would not print in her column, Mrs. McLellan replied, “Nothing that makes people feel creepy when they read it, like tragedies about children.”

And, she added, “I don’t think I should be the first person to let someone know her husband is having an affair.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Diana McLellan, 76, the Capital’s Gossip. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe